Within days after the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music.

Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

This week I interviewed Jason Sigal, Managing Director of the Free Music Archive, a brand new initiative developed by the acclaimed independent freeform New York-based FM and streaming radio station WFMU. Launched last month, the Free Music Archive is a curated archive of high quality legal audio downloads. The FMA pairs WFMU’s longstanding reputation and expertise with a model inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement, and presents a useful solution to copyright and regulation quandaries now facing the distribution of music online. - Ceci Moss

What conversations inspired the Free Music Archive?

The idea came from our Station Manager Ken Freedman and Assistant Station Manager Liz Berg, so you'd need to talk to them personally about the run up to the project. But this is the basic idea:

Radio is not enough. WFMU is at the forefront of using new technology to fulfill our mission, but outdated copyright law and the looming possibility of unfairly high royalties make it difficult to provide audio on-demand, to podcast, to archive, even to stream online. A lot of webcasters closed down as a result, because they would be paying more to webcast than to broadcast over FM/AM or what we would call 'terrestrial' radio. We want to support the artists we play. But SoundExchange (the performing rights organization who claims to collect royalties on behalf of all the world's recordings, not just those registered with the RIAA) has a gargantuan list of Unpaid Artists that they can't seem to track down. Glancing through it now...Kraftwerk's on here, the Afghan Whigs, X-Ray Spex, Ted Nugent...SoundExchange has a very difficult task at hand, and it's a valiant one, but if they can't find these artists, they're NEVER gonna be able to ...

To all those who want to participate in The Rhizome 50,000 Webpage but
need a little help with graphic tweaking, we've got a new service for
you! Because we don't want an unfamiliarity with or dislike of
Photoshop or other image programs to deter you from contributing to
this special website, we are offering to produce your image for you
in-house free of charge. That's right: Send your idea, or an image and
the URL you want to promote to 50k@rhizome.org and our staff can format
it into the size and corresponding pixel price you desire.

As the online component of Rhizome's spring fundraising drive, this
Webpage will provide important funds to the organization during tough
times. Already, artists, non-profits, galleries, businesses,
entrepreneurial bloggers, hopeless romantics and pranksters have made
their mark on what is becoming a colorful representation of the
community we support. We hope you'll get involved today!

From the US to Mexico, Jamaica, Africa, and beyond - Auto-Tune usage has splintered, with different approaches from scene to scene and artist to artist. (It remains the most sonically extreme in Berber Morocco.) The plug-in creates a different relation of voice to machine than ever before. Rather than novelty or some warped mimetic response to computers, Auto-Tune is a contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital. As such, it becomes quite humanizing. Auto-Tune operates as a duet between the electronics and the personal. A reconciliation with technology.

Afif has chosen the Palais de Tokyo as the last stage of a project that he has been working on for months. "Lyrics," his "sung retrospective" at the Palais de Tokyo, is an extension of the shows "Melancholic Beat", presented at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, "Down at the Rock and Roll Club" for the Moscow Biennial, and his exhibition at Albi's Centre d'Art Cimaises et Portiques of Albi. It is certainly a far cry from a classic retrospective. For each of these shows, the artist has invited a composer to "translate" into music his earlier installations, pushing to the extreme the potential of translation and re-creation of his work "in song."

Afif produces these songs as works of art by integrating them visually into the exhibition space. The lyrics cover the walls and visitors can listen to the songs on headphones. An installation made up of various materials scavenged by the artist from the holdings of the Palais de Tokyo will also serve as a stage for a concert scheduled to be performed the evening of the show's opening. Having drawn up a list of precise instructions, Afif commissioned various authors to write texts, then got the word out to musicians. Afif interpreting, interpreted, and reinterpreting his own work, which gives rise to a constant back-and-forth that certainly shakes up our perception of art.